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Today (November 27, 2012) is the 15th birthday of KDE e.V. (eingetragener Verein; registered association), the legal entity which represents the KDE Community in legal and financial matters. We interviewed two of the founding members (Matthias and Matthias) on the why, what and when of KDE e.V. in the beginning. Tomorrow, emeritus board member Mirko Böhm shares his thoughts.

Join the FSF and friends on Friday November 16th, from 2pm to 5pm EDT (18:00 to 21:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones. We will be on IRC in the #fsf channel on freenode. While these meetings will continue, this Friday will be our volunteer Andrew's last time running them, so lets make it a big one!

The next Open Data Day will be Saturday, February 23, 2013. We are more keen than ever to have this not just be about hacking code, but reusing other projects and broadening the community by using data to do all sorts of things from analysis to visualizations and even just sharing an interesting insight.

It's all the media's fault. Or, if not, the media helps perpetuate it. I'm talking about the cults of personality that often dominate the free software community -- not just the respect for accomplishment in an alleged meritocracy, but the undue influence that certain people are allowed to exercise.

Free software has a history of creating and supporting cults of personality. Since it is a widespread human phenomenon, it is easy to understand how this happens. It is, however, unhelpful and destructive and we really ought to actively discourage it, starting by putting aside the current cults.

About two months ago, we made the announcement that the project and its governance were being handed over to the community. Time has passed, the code is changing, and the project continues to thrive in new directions. I’d like to take a minute to explain the scope of what’s being done here.

Keynote Sessions covering a range of topics including Embedded Linux, Cloud Computing, Community and more from speakers including Linus Torvalds, Mark Shuttleworth, Brian Stevens, Mårten Mickos and other industry leaders and visionaries.

Hugo's project "Terms of Service: Didn't Read" has recently won international attention in publications such as TIME, Le Monde, and ZEIT, in it's campaign to simplify the legal terms of web services. He is FSFE’s French Team coordinator, co-founder of the Digital Freedoms association, and in 2009 did extensive work on the impact of Europe's Interoperability Framework (EIF) on Free Software users.

There were some ruffled feathers due to a blog post of Mark Shuttleworth regarding upcoming changes to Ubuntu's development process. Muktware approached him for clarification. A lot of development that was done internally by Canonical employees will now be opened up to selected community members for review and contribution.

AsiaBSDCon is announcing a call for papers. It is a conference for users and developers on BSD based systems and will next be held in Tokyo, in 14-17 March, 2013. The conference is for anyone developing, deploying and using systems based on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, Darwin and MacOS X.

The Blender Foundation has released Tears of Steel. The film was produced using only free software and the finished film, original footage and all the studio files will be released as under the Creative Commons Attribution license. Go grab the torrent!